BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING

Big brother is watching. But guess what? He is not the only one watching.


The media world is currently rift with news about the untoward methods employed by the now defunct News of the World. As much as Murdoch’s actions are considered astute in a business sense, I feel they were almost unnecessary. The exception to my assertion will perhaps be the moral issue of infringing on other people’s privacy.

My drift is that who takes News of the World seriously in the first place? The stories it ran especially in our generation have always been aimed at an audience obsessed with all that is not necessarily true or out rightly spurious. This said, I really wish I can get a copy of the ‘closing edition” of the paper as part of my growing magazine collection.

Sometimes, we have to confront that which is baseless and incorrect in our world. I decided to write this post when earlier this week I stumbled into an e-copy of a letter of mine written in 2008 to correct a columnist who had gone out of line on the Nigerian Guardian. As if all the newspapers’ readers were waiting for the letter to the published, my article triggered a cascade of responses that ran for a couple of months in the newspaper.

People know what has substance from what constitutes junk. The fact that nothing is said in response to junk media is partly an attempt not to dignify what is “low beef”. I am still of the opinion that the shutting down of News of the World is just a business decision. People always knew they were dubious in information gathering and its news was at the least, exaggerated. Silence does not always infer ignorance.